Corruption

Washington’s Invisible Man

As the lobbyist who has ignited what might be the biggest government scandal since Watergate, Jack Abramoff became notorious for tossing around money, much of it from the casinos of his Indian-tribe clients, to influence key lawmakers. Now, as he talks (and talks) to the feds, Washington is waiting to see whom he’ll take down with him.

By now, Jack Abramoff is known in just about every home and Grange hall and shopping mall, every Middlesex village and farm, in America. He’s the Washington lobbyist who bought all those senators and representatives, the man who ripped off all those Indian tribes he represented, the butt of all those late-night-TV jokes. He’s the fellow responsible for what might be the biggest government scandal since Watergate, the man whose sullied example could maybe, possibly, help clean up Washington. He’s the guy who wore that infamous black hat on the day he admitted it all.

Abramoff is known everywhere but in two buildings, that is: the United States Capitol and the White House. Sure, he spread around millions of Indian-tribe dollars, to say nothing of golf trips to Scotland and free meals at Signatures, his own fancy restaurant, and luxury-box seats at sporting events—American Indians, of all people, paying for Redskins tickets—among roughly 270 members of Congress. Sure, a few senators and representatives admit to having brushed up against Abramoff, but only long enough for him to have “duped” or “misled” them. And President Bush can barely remember him: for a couple of Hanukkahs, Abramoff apparently stood on grip-and-grin lines at the White House to be photographed with the president, but almost anybody can do that.

Being airbrushed out of a whole community in which he cut so wide a swath for the past 10 years, where he helped revolutionize lobbying, where he was very nearly ubiquitous and invincible—it’s enough to hurt someone’s feelings. On other matters related to his situation he tiptoes, as would anyone whose fate—the amount of time he will languish in prison—lies in the hands of prosecutors and the judge. But for someone who has fought his whole career to be acknowledged and respected and feared, being treated like a nonperson is simply too much to take. “For a guy who did all these evil things that have been so widely reported, it’s pretty amazing, considering I didn’t know anyone,” Abramoff says sardonically. “You’re really no one in this town unless you haven’t met me.”

Just to cite one typical example, the head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, said in an interview, “Abramoff is someone who we don’t know a lot about. We know what we read in the paper,” even though, according to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, Mehlman exchanged e-mail with Abramoff, did him political favors (such as blocking Clinton-administration alumnus Allen Stayman from keeping a State Department job), had Sabbath dinner at his house, and offered to pick up his tab at Signatures. (According to a spokesperson, Mehlman does not recall the e-mail exchange, “because he was often contacted by political supporters with suggestions and ideas,” or the Sabbath dinner.) The newly elected House majority leader, John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, also doesn’t know Abramoff, but Abramoff’s clients gave him $30,000 over the past few years, and ate many meals at Signatures. (For a couple of years, Abramoff’s principal liaison with Boehner was David Safavian—a former member of “Team Abramoff” and later head of procurement for the White House Office of Management and Budget—who has been indicted for lying about his Abramoff ties.)

Then there’s presidential adviser Karl Rove. He has not spoken of his relationship with Abramoff, but the White House insists Rove, too, barely knew him, acknowledging only that they met at a political event in the 1990s. “He would describe him as a casual acquaintance,” a White House spokesman said. But Abramoff was Rove’s spiritual heir at the College Republicans in the 1980s; both men headed the group, and the two met from time to time in connection with it. After George W. Bush took office, Susan Ralston, Abramoff’s administrative assistant, took the same position with Rove at the White House, where Abramoff met with Rove at least once. (An eyewitness also recalls seeing Abramoff emerge from a car near the White House and have what looked like a pre-arranged, street-corner meeting with Rove; Abramoff says he can’t recall that.) Rove dined several times at Signatures and was Abramoff’s guest in the owner’s box at the N.C.A.A. basketball playoffs a few years ago, sitting for much of the game by Abramoff’s side. Recently, three former associates of Abramoff’s have told how he frequently mentioned his strong ties to Rove, and one described being present when Abramoff took a phone call from Rove’s office.

Then, most important, there’s President Bush. “I, frankly, don’t even remember having my picture taken with the guy,” he has said. But how about those 10 or so photographs of him with Abramoff, or with Abramoff’s sons, or of Laura Bush with Abramoff’s daughters, apparently taken during all of those meetings that never took place? And the time when the president joked with Abramoff about his weight lifting: “What are you benching, buff guy?” How about the invitation to the ranch in Crawford, where Abramoff would have joined all of the other big Bush fund-raisers? Abramoff didn’t go to that—it fell on the Sabbath, which, as an Orthodox Jew, Abramoff observes—but how about that speech Bush gave to big donors in 2003, when Abramoff sat only a few feet away, between Republican senators George Allen (Virginia) and Orrin Hatch (Utah), and was the only lobbyist on the dais?

“He has one of the best memories of any politician I have ever met,” Abramoff wrote of the president in yet another of his notorious e-mails, which have evolved from his principal means of communication to the rope with which he has hanged, and continues to hang, himself. “Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows.”

There are other people from Abramoff’s more distant past who also never knew him, such as former Republican House Speaker (and rumored 2008 presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, who first never met Abramoff during the latter’s firebrand days atop the College Republicans. “Before his picture appeared on TV and in the newspapers, Newt wouldn’t have known him if he fell across him. He hadn’t seen him in 10 years,” Gingrich’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, tells me. That this especially rankles Abramoff becomes clear as he rummages through a box of old memorabilia with me. “Here’s [former Republican Texas congressman and House majority leader] Dick Armey,” he tells me. “Here’s Newt. Newt. Newt. [Former president Ronald] Reagan. More Newt. Newt with Grover [Norquist, the Washington conservative Republican *Über-*strategist and longtime Abramoff friend] this time, and with [Seattle arch-conservative Republican] Rabbi [Daniel] Lapin. But Newt never met me. [Indicted Iran-contra figure and longtime Abramoff friend] Ollie North. Newt. Can’t be Newt … he never met me. Oh, Newt! What’s he doing there? Must be a Newt look-alike. I have more pictures of him than I have of my wife. Newt again! It’s sick! I thought he never met me!”

After a public evisceration unlike any in recent history, and facing a decade or more in jail, Jack Abramoff, the 47-year-old father of five, who spent 10 hyperkinetic, largely introspection-free years as both Washington’s most powerful lobbyist and a key Republican activist, is contrite and humble. He is trying to salvage for himself a modicum of self-respect, along with some mercy and understanding from the judge who holds his fate in her hands. He admits that he stepped over ethical lines, insulted and misled his clients, offended the God to whom he regularly prays. By court decree, he owes the Indian tribes approximately $25 million in restitution, and he owes the I.R.S. at least $1.7 million. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, when Orthodox Jews beat their breasts for their sins, he can flagellate himself with great conviction. But for Jack Abramoff, the time for on-the-record rancor is over. However angry he may be with former cronies who supped at his trough and accepted his favors but who now call him a “sleazebag” or a “creep” and wish he’d never been born, he bites his tongue. What really upsets him is all this revisionism, all these people pretending he never existed.

“Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn’t know me is almost certainly lying,” he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. “This is not an age when you can run away from facts,” he declares. “I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs.”

On January 3, Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax evasion. Court documents describe how he encouraged at least four Indian tribes to hire his former associate Michael Scanlon, who had his own public-relations company, for grassroots work—largely political campaigning in the field, such as letter writing, phone banks, and media advertisements—without disclosing that Abramoff himself was getting kickbacks of almost half of Scanlon’s profits. Both Scanlon’s fees and Abramoff’s take were enormous: $30,510,000 from the Louisiana Coushattas, of which Abramoff received $11,450,000; $14,765,000 from the Mississippi Band of Choctaws ($6,364,000 to Abramoff); and $3,500,000 from the Saginaw Chippewas of Michigan ($540,000 to Abramoff).

Similarly, Scanlon received $4,200,000 from the Tiguas of Texas, who were seeking to reopen a casino in El Paso. Abramoff had assured the Tiguas that he would work for free, but under his arrangement with Scanlon he surreptitiously pocketed $1,850,000. In this instance, compounding the deceit was a conflict of interest: Abramoff failed to disclose that, on behalf of another tribe, he had helped shut down the Tiguas’ casino to begin with, then aided in killing legislation that might have allowed them to start up again.

“I think Jack is the ultimate con man,” said Marc Schwartz, a former consultant to the Tiguas, who watched Abramoff win over tribal members in 2002 with his chartered jet, his wireless laptop and BlackBerry, and what appeared to be his dazzling accomplishments for other Indian tribes. To Schwartz, who became friendly with Abramoff, subsequent revelations about his dishonesty and bribery of public officials have made him the Mark McGwire of lobbyists, a man whose cheating has tainted whatever good he accomplished. “Greed and avarice got to Jack, and his constant references to his Orthodoxy and his self-described passion for righting wrongs made the betrayal I felt so much greater,” says Schwartz.

The plea agreement also charges Abramoff with “corruption of public officials,” in particular “Representative #1,” universally understood to be Republican congressman Bob Ney of Ohio. It states that in exchange for “a stream of things of value”—foreign and domestic travel, golf fees, food, jobs for relatives, and both campaign contributions and a contribution to the National Republican Campaign Committee at his request—Ney became Abramoff’s fixer on Capitol Hill.

The offenses don’t stop there. Abramoff ripped off the law-and-lobbying firm he worked for by essentially lobbying behind its back. He misused tax-exempt charities such as his own foundation, the Capital Athletic Foundation, in one instance using $50,000 donated to it by a tribal client to help fund an August 2002 golfing trip to Scotland for himself, members of his staff, Ney, Ney staffers, and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed.

Abramoff also funneled $50,000 through a charity to the wife of Tony Rudy, a top aide to former House majority leader Tom DeLay (Republican of Texas), in exchange for Rudy’s help in obtaining legislation to block Internet gambling and in opposing postal-rate increases. Rudy subsequently went to work for Abramoff, as did Ney’s former chief of staff Neil Volz, who lobbied his former employer within less than a year of his departure—yet another violation of the law. As if that weren’t enough, Abramoff in a separate case has pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy in the 2000 purchase of SunCruz Casinos, a Florida casino-boat company. That transaction ended in a bankruptcy and a Mob rubout, though no one, including the prosecutors in Miami, has ever linked Abramoff directly to the murder.

In return for what he hopes will be a shorter sentence, Abramoff is spilling his secrets to the Justice Department. In the past 19 months or so, prosecutors and investigators have spent something approaching 200 hours pumping him for information. Allegedly as many as 15 people—from various branches of the Justice Department (including the F.B.I.), the Department of the Interior, the Internal Revenue Service, and other federal agencies—are listening. It is an evolving process, for, with prosecutors (as with reporters), Abramoff has been a work in progress, moving from defiance to denial to self-justification to contrition. As time has passed and the parties have grown accustomed to one another, the information has grown more solid and specific. For Abramoff, unemployed and unemployable, talking with the authorities is as close as he gets these days to a full-time job. Once, his stock-in-trade was whom he knew. Now it is what he knows. “In a different era I’d be killed on the street or have poison poured into my coffee,” he says.

What they are all interested in is the nearly $4 million—largely gambling revenues from the casinos of his tribal clients—that Abramoff spread around Washington. Two-thirds of that went either to the Republican Party, his ideological home since college, or to individual Republicans, many of whom could dole out appropriations, move along legislation, or perform a host of other chores that the tribes wanted. Democrats, too, mainly in the Senate, could do Abramoff favors, and, while they may have abhorred his politics, his money still smelled good. They got more than a million dollars.

The other shoe seems poised to drop in Washington, implicating perhaps a handful of senators and congressmen, as well as their staffs, relatives, and other public officials. The most obvious target is Ney. In their heyday, he and Abramoff played golf together, traveled together, philosophized together. Ney was one of the few elected officials Abramoff invited to the Bar Mitzvah of one of his three sons. Now Ney says that Abramoff “duped” and “misled” him. But, according to the plea agreement, Ney threw a lucrative contract to an Abramoff client, intervened with agencies and offices to seek favors for other Abramoff interests, helped a relative of one of Abramoff’s Russian clients obtain an American visa, agreed to introduce legislation that would help reopen the Tigua casino, and, to assist Abramoff in buying the SunCruz line, read two statements into the Congressional Record, one in which he described Abramoff’s main partner in that deal, Adam Kidan—a man who’d been disbarred, declared bankruptcy, and had Mob ties—as a man of the utmost integrity.

For such services, Ney, according to the plea agreement, got “a stream of things of value” from Abramoff and those he represented: a “lavish” golf trip to St. Andrews, seats in Abramoff’s sports boxes, freebie dinners at Signatures (Ney was a “sushiholic,” one eyewitness recalls), and at least $37,500 in donations to various political-action committees on his behalf. Rather than go for Ney immediately, prosecutors appear to be encircling him, possibly striking plea deals with frightened staffers, themselves desperate to stay out of jail.

Also in the prosecutorial crosshairs may be Republican senator Conrad Burns, of Montana, one of the largest single recipients of Abramoff loot. As head of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for the Department of the Interior, which handles Indian affairs, he was Abramoff’s point man in the Senate for federal goodies.

Burns told a reporter he wishes Abramoff had never been born, and, more recently, has blanketed the airwaves in Montana with ads claiming that Abramoff “lied to anybody and everybody” and “ripped off his Indian clients,” but that “he never influenced me.” Abramoff won’t comment specifically on the ads, clearly tempted as he is. “Every appropriation we wanted [from Burns’s committee] we got,” he says. “Our staffs were as close as they could be. They practically used Signatures as their cafeteria. I mean, it’s a little difficult for him to run from that record.” As for Burns’s wishing he’d never been born, Abramoff remarks, “That’s quite a statement, coming from a pro-life Republican.”

Burns, however, ranks only fourth on the list of Abramoff’s recipients, having taken $55,590, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (though even Burns’s own people put that figure at closer to $150,000). The other four of the top-five largest individual recipients, all Republicans, were: Representative J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, co-chairman of the Congressional Native American Caucus ($69,620); Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi ($65,500); House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois ($58,500); and Representative John T. Doolittle of California ($45,000). Several of them are reportedly targets of the Justice Department’s investigation, as is the man who was Abramoff’s main liaison at the Interior Department, former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles, a onetime mining-industry lobbyist who a high-ranking colleague told the Senate was Abramoff’s water carrier in the department.

The Democrats insist that the Abramoff scandal is strictly a Republican affair. Of the more than $200,000 he gave away of his personal money, not a dime went to the Democrats. He always stipulated that his lobbying activities accord with his staunchly conservative beliefs. But Democrats received money from Abramoff’s tribal clients, including: Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada ($30,500); Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota ($28,000); Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa ($14,500); and Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island ($31,000).

Bribery prosecutions are notoriously tough to make; while there was plenty of quid floating around, it can be very hard to prove the quo, at least without smoking guns like wiretapped conversations. Clearly, the voluminous e-mail trail will help. Along with evidentiary problems, there’s also the question of political will. Perhaps after a few examples have been made, the Bush administration will declare victory and walk away from further prosecutions, especially if, should Democrats also be implicated, the opposition lets them. In another sense, though, the Abramoff scandal now transcends Abramoff. With congressional staffers and, perhaps, some congressmen willing to say anything to save their own skins, the fire could spread unabated.

For Abramoff’s crimes, the statutory maximum is 30 years. But, as calculated in the plea agreement under the federal sentencing guidelines, he is subject to somewhere between 108 and 135 months in prison. That can be substantially reduced for cooperation, though given the notoriety of the case, everyone agrees, Abramoff is certain to do substantial jail time. The best guess is that Abramoff will be sentenced in a year or two, and spend at least a few years behind bars. It all rests with Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, who took Abramoff’s plea and heard his abject apology.

Ever since his days as an undergraduate at Brandeis University in the late 1970s, Abramoff has been a right-wing conservative zealot—a “Republican warrior,” as he puts it. He has never voted for a Democrat in his life (and now, as a convicted felon, he probably never will). Paradoxically, it was Republicans who did Jack Abramoff in. According to an insider, Abramoff believes his downfall began with competing Republican lobbyists who coveted his clientele and fed damaging information about him to The Washington Post. And it continued with Senator John McCain (Republican of Arizona), whose hearings into Abramoff’s dealings with the Indians ran for five gory, highly publicized sessions in 2004 and 2005.

At the top of his game, Abramoff was master of his domain. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal did glowing front-page profiles of him. He had his “Team Abramoff,” the cadre of young, hungry associates, many fresh recruits from the Hill, in whom he inculcated his scorched-earth, win-at-all-costs mentality. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” he tells me. Few lobbyists in Washington generated more business; in one year, he brought in $12 million. He presided over his empire at Signatures, which he opened in February 2002, between the Capitol and the White House, and which became a kind of command center for him. Abramoff’s perch was Table 40, where the movers and shakers of official Washington came to him. “It was like Frank Sinatra,” recalls Monty Warner, a Republican media strategist who remains friendly with Abramoff. “I can remember Ney coming up and groveling, saying how much he enjoyed a golf outing or skybox or ball game, and really appreciated Jack’s support.”

These days Signatures is locked up. And Abramoff, the ultimate lobbyist, now has his most challenging client: himself. In the past couple of years, he has become a cartoon-character bad guy, as he puts it. The image peaked on the day of his plea deal, when he wore the now infamous black hat. He had put it on because Orthodox Jews are supposed to cover their heads, but he feared that the yarmulke he would normally have worn would invite charges of false or newly minted piety. Besides, the forecast had called for rain. But he had unwittingly stepped right into a stereotype: Meet Jack Abramoff—the Fat Cat in the Hat.

Rehabilitation is a delicate maneuver. How do you prostrate and stand up for yourself at once? When Abramoff speaks to a reporter these days, he veers between the cathartic and the strategic. He says something, then thinks better of it. Ultimately, he is savvy enough to know that at this point in his saga the smart money lies with accepting his fate; no one who matters to him now is much interested in his self-pity or rage. When it comes to speaking freely, then, Abramoff’s sentence has already begun. For public consumption, he has become something his friends and enemies would never recognize: cautious and conciliatory. He was getting to be too nice, unconvincingly so, I told him at one point. He laughed knowingly. I’d better hurry up and finish, he said; pretty soon, he’d turn into a saint.

For Abramoff, his is not a story of theft or greed; it is a colossal misunderstanding. He still sees himself as an idealist, a philanthropist, a visionary—someone who, as he puts it, “flies at 30,000 feet,” too preoccupied with larger, weightier issues to deal with quotidian details, like contractual arrangements or his choice of business partners or the finer points of the law. His corner cutting and legerdemain, he says, were not only never venal, but had a higher purpose. As an Orthodox Jew, Abramoff will not even write out God’s name, but he saw himself as his instrument.

Abramoff’s orbit now consists largely of his home, his lawyer’s office, and the F.B.I. Gone are the skyboxes; he still has Wizards tickets—a remnant of his prior life, expiring at the end of the season—but he doesn’t go. From the suite that was his office at the lobbying-and-law firm of Greenberg Traurig—the biggest on the premises, big enough to drive foam golf balls in—and a team of 30, he’s been reduced to a cheerless, windowless room not far from the White House (it looks like, well, a cell) and a part-time secretary. He rarely goes there.

Clearly, part of Abramoff feels that he has been unfairly targeted, that he did not invent all of the abuses with which he was charged. He was not the first lobbyist to spread money around, or to throw fund-raisers, or to treat congressmen to exotic trips. He did what other lobbyists did, only more so: more intelligently, more aggressively, more effectively, more unrelentingly, more ruthlessly. Other people surely wrote e-mails every bit as embarrassing as his, in which he called his Indian clients “troglodytes” and “morons” and “monkeys,” “the stupidest idiots in the land.” In one particularly damning e-mail he counseled Scanlon, “The key thing to remember with all these clients is that they are annoying, but that the annoying losers are the only ones which have this kind of money and part with it so quickly. So, we have to put up with this stuff.”

Abramoff has apologized profusely for those e-mails. They were not meant as racial slurs, he says; he claims he’s never made a racist comment, at least consciously, in his life. Most of them, he has pointed out, were written to Scanlon, with whom he spoke a kind of vulgar patois, part locker room, part drill sergeant, part gangsta rap. I ask him whether what he wrote about a tribe in another e-mail—“Oh, well, stupid folks get wiped out”—could be applied to him, the author of all those self-incriminating statements. “Well, here I am,” he replies.

He also maintains that whatever he charged the Indians they more than earned back on his results. And it is absolutely true that in the bizarre world of Indian gaming a few strategic moves with the right politicians or bureaucrats are worth millions, billions. It is also true that the very documents that show Abramoff’s ridicule of the Indians also illustrate how indefatigably he pushed their interests. So, too, did the final two days of McCain’s Senate hearings, which chronicled his extraordinary influence over the Department of the Interior. Now, though, he’s been turned into some kind of predator, worse for Native Americans than Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer. “The entire Indian country has come together in a big kumbaya of hatred for me,” he says. “It just tears at my soul.”

“I was moving a mile a minute and didn’t conceive that I could be doing something wrong, and as I got near to the edge I either concealed it or I convinced myself that I wasn’t having a problem,” he explains. “I was basically so busy winning that I didn’t see what I was doing. They say, ‘Stop and smell the roses’? I didn’t stop and smell the dung heap. Unfortunately, now I’m paying for it dearly.”

‘You can take one of two points of view about Abramoff,” a man familiar with the Senate investigation tells me. “Either he’d always been a bad egg and he was put into a position where he could really flourish, or he was a classic Greek tragic hero: someone who was charismatic, diligent, effective, and a movement conservative adhering to the principles while serving his clients’ interests, but who got caught up in the Master of the Universe syndrome.” This man subscribed to the first theory. But Abramoff has a third: It’s all divine will. God is punishing him for his misdeeds. He’s sometimes tempted to complain.

“I could say to God, ‘How dare you do this?’ ” he says. “ ‘I became religious, against every influence in my environment. I fought to be kosher; there were times I didn’t eat. There were times I walked to synagogue in bloody feet.’ I could say that very easily, but I don’t say it for a second. Why? Because I am the bearer of many transgressions, from stuff that is known to all the stuff known only to me.”

He remains radioactive. Tom DeLay, who once called Abramoff “one of my closest and dearest friends,” no longer talks to him. Nor does Scanlon, who struck a plea deal before he did. “Anyone who is anywhere near anything that has to do with me has been advised by their lawyers not to talk to me,” Abramoff says.

Ralph Reed’s race for lieutenant governor of Georgia has foundered since it was disclosed that Reed, who says he opposes gambling, accepted gambling money from Abramoff on a lobbying job, then insisted he hadn’t known about it. The two are now estranged; when Norquist got married last year, Reed steered clumsily clear of Abramoff’s table. And, Abramoff says, Newt Gingrich sneered at him. Doug Bandow, a conservative whom Abramoff paid to write newspaper pieces favoring Abramoff positions, was drummed out of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, and lost his syndicated column. Some think Abramoff’s politically ambitious lawyer, Abbe Lowell, was crazy for taking on a client who seems to blacken whatever he touches.

Abramoff’s friends—and some still do exist, despite the hordes who have run for the hills—marvel at the vituperation he generates. “Jack wasn’t that great when he was on top and he’s not that bad now that he’s fallen from grace,” says Laurence R. Latourette, former managing partner at Abramoff’s first lobbying firm and now a headhunter in Washington. “He was an aggressive, occasionally ruthless, and largely effective hired gun. He didn’t reach out and screw people because he liked to hurt them. At the same time, he didn’t let much stand in the way when pursuing his goals. Jack’s not intentionally immoral. He can be amoral.”

“In everything he did he was over the top, and not everything he did was bad,” said another close friend, a rabbi who asked not to be identified. “He was good over the top and bad over the top.”

When I began writing about Abramoff, I assumed he’d hunkered down. That’s what most lawyers have their clients do, even when, as in Abramoff’s case, silence only exacerbates their problems. I made the obligatory call to Abramoff’s law firm and was told, unsurprisingly, that there’d be no interview. Imagine my surprise, then, when an e-mail from him arrived. Very belatedly, he was taking no chances. “This email is off the record and must not be used or forwarded by you to anyone,” it unceremoniously began. “If that is agreeable, please continue reading. If not, please delete. Thanks.”

Abramoff went on to say he’d heard of my article-to-be, and asked whether it would be “just another in the long line of slam pieces” he’d endured over the previous two years or whether I was “an out of the box thinker/writer who might actually be the one to write the other side of this saga.” He went on: “Of the usual slam pieces, there are over 2,100 so far—including a few written by excellent writers who misrepresented to me that they wanted to ‘tell the untold story’ and ‘give me more of a human face’ etc., etc.” If I could convince him otherwise, he said, he’d consider talking to me.

“I have long prayed for that one chance to have my side told, unblemished by the cartoon image I have been assigned,” he went on, “but I am also prepared to have this prayer remain unanswered.” I replied that writing the 2,101st “slam piece” didn’t interest me, as a journalist or a human being. I also, at his request, presented my bona fides as a Jew. He agreed to meet me a few days later at Eli’s, one of only two kosher delicatessens in Washington now that Abramoff’s own, short-lived effort, Stacks, had closed. Eli’s had the usual bedraggled look of kosher delis in the flyover states. But Abramoff himself surprised me.

He was shorter and stockier than I’d anticipated, with a black felt yarmulke on his head, something I’d not noticed in the pictures. Dressed casually and out of his usual power suits, he was a bit of a zhlub, far less scary than the man who had threatened in his e-mails to crush rival lobbyists “like bugs.” He was also far more soft-spoken, polite, friendly, self-deprecating, and funny than I’d have ever expected. At adjacent tables people cast furtive glances at him, then talked into their hands as he passed. He saw it, as did I, but he was not fazed. Abramoff spoke continuously—so much so that I filibustered a bit before his hamburger got cold. He then ate it ravenously. To his acute embarrassment, he’s put on 50 pounds. It’s all the stress, he says.

‘He always had a very vaudevillian, bombastic, exaggerated personality,” a classmate of Abramoff’s from Beverly Hills High School remembers. “There was clearly some insecurity deep within him that made him have to prove himself in all kinds of ways. There was a side of him that kind of came from the Borscht Belt. He seemed a little out of place in California.” In fact, Abramoff was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1959; his father, Frank, headed golf legend Arnold Palmer’s sports marketing company. (Once an 11-handicap golfer, Abramoff took his first lesson from Palmer.) When the elder Abramoff assumed a position with Diners Club, the family moved to Los Angeles. In high school, Abramoff set weight-lifting records and played center on the football team. The family was already Republican but only mildly religious; Abramoff’s road to Damascus was Wilshire Boulevard, where he saw the 1971 movie Fiddler on the Roof, then vowed to reclaim his Jewish heritage and headed into Orthodoxy.

At Brandeis—he says another famous family friend, prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson, helped get him in—Abramoff was a straight arrow who walked out when people began smoking marijuana. There, as in several later incarnations, he became the charismatic center of a loyal entourage, people who enjoyed his company and did his bidding. At this largely Jewish campus in Massachusetts in the late 1970s, there was little competition for the post of Republican big shot. He went on to head the Massachusetts College Republicans, and in 1980 helped Ronald Reagan carry the state George McGovern had won only eight years before. His partner in that effort was Grover Norquist, then a Harvard graduate student and now, as head of Americans for Tax Reform, one of the most important Republican operatives in Washington. (Norquist, whom Abramoff calls “the great unknown genius of politics,” is one of the few people who publicly stood by him initially, though he refused to speak with Vanity Fair. “Grover’s one of the most brave political strategists, one of the most important political figures in the early part of this century,” Abramoff says. “He is also a very decent person. He’s been nothing but friendly and sympathetic.”)

From Massachusetts, Abramoff and Norquist took the top posts in the College Republican National Committee. Ralph Reed, then the baby-faced state chairman from Georgia, became Abramoff’s projects director. To both the exhilaration and, occasionally, the discomfort of Republican grown-ups, Abramoff electrified the once sleepy organization, largely through imaginative right-wing street theater: burning Soviet flags, building and destroying mock Berlin Walls, re-assembling the American medical students who’d been rescued during Reagan’s 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. “That’s when I first didn’t meet Newt Gingrich,” he recalls.

If Reagan had a favorite designated “young person,” it was surely Jack Abramoff. Accustomed, from his time as governor of California, to dealing with bearded Berkeley rabble-rousers, the president found this clean-cut, earnest young man a breath of fresh air. In the College Republicans’ annual report for 1983 is a picture of the two in the Oval Office, with radiant beams emanating from chairman Jack Abramoff’s 24-year-old eyes. “It was like meeting the king,” he now recalls. At a birthday party the College Republicans threw for Reagan in the early 1980s Abramoff met his wife, Pamela, who knew Ralph Reed.

Abramoff and Norquist left the College Republicans in 1985 to take over Citizens for America, an organization designed to push Reagan’s political agenda. But Abramoff soon crossed swords with the co-founder of the group, former New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman—Abramoff and his staffers had “gone hog wild” on their spending, a Lehrman aide told The Washington Post—and was fired. Abramoff then turned to producing films. From 1986 to 1994 he made a few stinkers, most notably Red Scorpion, an anti-Communist parable filmed in Namibia that everyone hated, Abramoff included. But shortly after that, he abandoned show business. It was 1994, and the Republicans now ran Congress. It was time to get back into politics.

Right after the election, Jonathan Blank, Abramoff’s next-door neighbor and a senior partner at the Washington office of the law-and-lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, ran into him in synagogue and offered him a job. Like all such firms, Preston Gates (the Gates is Bill’s father), based in Seattle, was in sudden, desperate need of Republicans. Abramoff hesitated. To him, lobbying sounded dull, and lobbyists were mainstream, cautious, unimaginative types, very much in the box, anathema to true conservatives. He accepted the offer, but only on his terms: His practice would be ideological, an extension of his conservative Republican activism. Anything politically uncongenial he simply would not do. The firm was just as ambivalent. The parties agreed to a six-month trial marriage.

Abramoff quickly brought in clients such as the government of Pakistan and, most important, the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific whose exemption from certain American labor laws—factories there could pay their workers a pittance but still label their products “Made in the U.S.A.”—was for Abramoff a classic case of free enterprise at work. So, too, he felt, were the Indian reservations. The Indians had always been Democrats, for Democrats were more sensitive to their social-welfare needs. Abramoff landed the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and promptly made their agenda mesh with that of the conservatives, most spectacularly by re-framing a Republican proposal to tax gaming revenues as a tax increase, then helping to kill it. The Choctaws saved hundreds of millions in taxes over the next decade. That paid a lot of bills. In five years, the tribe paid an extraordinary $7 million to Preston Gates, but they weren’t complaining.

A key ally in that effort had been DeLay, whom Abramoff met in 1994. “I have admired Tom DeLay and his family from the first meeting with him, and I still do to this day,” says Abramoff. I mentioned that DeLay once referred to him as one of his closest friends. “I am honored that he ever thought that of me,” he says. “We would sit and talk about the Bible. We would sit and talk about opera. We would sit and talk about golf. I mean, we talked about philosophy and politics.” He adds, “I didn’t spend a lot of time lobbying Tom for things, because the things I worked on were usually consistent with the conservative philosophy, and I knew Tom would be supportive.” Still, whether he was lobbying DeLay or not, his $450,500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee must have made DeLay very happy.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Abramoff hired several DeLay staffers and others closely connected to important congressmen. Mostly, they were long on enthusiasm and deference, short on wisdom—too young, as someone who came to know Abramoff well put it, “to have hair on their nuts.” The template was Michael Scanlon, a top aide to DeLay whom Abramoff hired at Preston Gates. Lots of people didn’t like him, with all his swagger and football metaphors and cheesy smoothness. But to Abramoff he was creative and tactical and ingenious: “out of the box,” to use his highest encomium. Scanlon was “Abramoff’s evil elf,” as someone calls him.

At Preston Gates, Abramoff remained a divisive figure. The firm didn’t like his clients—representing sweatshops made for bad publicity back in liberal Seattle—or his associates: the day he brought in Ralph Reed “all of the liberal Democrats went absolutely fucking nuts,” an eyewitness recalls. Nor did they always appreciate his take-no-prisoners style. A former Clinton administration official blames Abramoff for going at him so relentlessly—having him subpoenaed, investigated, fired, and attacked in The Washington Times—that he finally called a mutual acquaintance of theirs. “Isn’t this guy ever going to let up and get a life?” he asked this friend. “He’s relentless and he’s vindictive and he’ll never let up,” the friend replied. “He sees the world as friends and enemies, and you destroy your enemies.” At the rate he was going, one of the firm’s heads once warned him, Abramoff would wind up “dead, disgraced, or in jail.” But Abramoff persisted.

“Most lobbyists meet with a committee chairman, staff, a few members,” Abramoff recalls. “We’d meet with the whole leadership of the House and Senate, the entire committee on both sides, then create a roster of who might ideologically support the idea and get them in the war. Then we’d activate people from the district where the client was. We’d get people firing constantly on the decision-makers. And we’d outwork everyone in the media, pay think-tank people to rile them up in the press. Most Washington lobbyists are lazy, people of limits, people who move glacially slow. For better or worse, I’m a very driven person. I felt my job was to go out there and save the world…. I thought it was immoral to take someone’s money and not win for them. And we basically didn’t lose.”

Still, he felt underappreciated and restless. He was skeptical when Greenberg Traurig, a Miami-based firm with an unremarkable lobbying practice, came courting, but was gradually won over. What clinched the deal was something Abramoff recalls the firm’s president, Cesar Alvarez, said: “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” That suited him fine. He bolted to the firm’s Washington, D.C., office, along with all 11 of his acolytes, and a reported $8 million in business.

Here, too, “Team Abramoff” met resistance. Wearing conservative suits and ties in a place that favored more casual wear, they “looked like a cult,” said a lobbyist there. But, overnight, Greenberg became the fourth-largest lobbyist in town. Much of that money came from Indian tribes. The Mississippi Choctaws were joined by the Louisiana Coushattas, the Saginaw Chippewas, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the Sandia Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, and the Tiguas, among others. Most had, essentially, the same problems: averting efforts to tax the tribes or reduce their sovereignty; securing favorable legislation on health, housing, education, and other services; winning appropriations and grants of land in trust; and protecting their casino licenses against political vicissitudes and rival Indian tribes hoping to open casinos of their own.

Abramoff delivered on these fronts, especially in beating back rival casinos. Several tribes also got visits with President Bush at the White House, or dinner with Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Indeed, with George Bush in the White House, Abramoff had the Interior Department wired. His point man was former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles; various Abramoff e-mails, along with former department legal counsel Michael Rossetti’s testimony to the Senate committee, show how faithfully Griles did Abramoff’s bidding. (Griles denies any wrongdoing.) “There was a swagger to [Abramoff’s] walk,” Wayne Smith, deputy assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Interior Department during Bush’s first term, recalls. “He was very clear that he was very well connected. He mentioned that he was a major fund-raiser, very tight with Rove. The impression was ‘Hey, I am a force to be reckoned with.’ ”

Abramoff charged in a variety of ways. There were his fees. There were the contributions he had the tribes make, to his foundation and other organizations, which he would then funnel to politicians or his pet charity. Then, most fatefully, there was his take of the colossal fees that Scanlon (who had opened his own public-relations firm in 2001) charged for services rendered, under-rendered, and unrendered between 2001 and 2004. Greenberg Traurig knew nothing about that, but that was all right by Abramoff, who considered his grassroots work with Scanlon moonlighting that didn’t constitute lobbying. The Indians were never explicitly told about the deal, either, Abramoff concedes, but that was also all right because, to him at least, the work he did was so valuable.

“Their casinos were going down the tubes, so it was not an issue of ‘Jack, what are you doing?,’ it was ‘Jack, win, win, win,’ and it was Jack saying, ‘We’re going to win,’ ” Abramoff says. “Their response was ‘If you win, it’s worth it. If you lose, it’s not worth a dollar. Just go win.’ Yes, I did wrong, but I did a hell of a lot right too. Basically, I was the best thing they had going. I knew it, they knew it. My mistake was not informing them [about Scanlon].”

In April 2002, The New York Times ran a front-page profile of Abramoff. “I call Jack Abramoff, and I get results,” the vice-chairman of the Coushattas, William Worfel, told the newspaper. Never one to rest on his oars, as Reagan had observed of him, Abramoff cast about for still more Indian clients. But without knowing it he had hit his high-water mark. Rival tribal officials, dismayed by the huge payments to Abramoff and Scanlon, got word to lobbyists eager for some of Abramoff’s Indian business, who in turn reached the press.

On the front page of The Washington Post for February 22, 2004, Susan Schmidt broke the story of Abramoff’s astronomical fees. His underlings were horrified by what they read. “Lots of damning things in there,” one of them e-mailed. “I know more than [the] article and the truth is worse.” But Abramoff himself was initially sanguine: the Post was really accusing him of no more than making lots of money. He even weighed posting the piece on his Web site. Two tribes quickly rose to Abramoff’s defense, faulting the Post for suggesting that the Indians were either too dumb to protect themselves or too poor to deserve first-class representation. The chief of the Mississippi Choctaws, Phillip Martin, said that Abramoff had done a “fantastic job” and was “definitely worth the money” (though Martin would recant six months later). “Sure, the new lobbyists are 1/10 the cost,” the former chief of the Saginaw Chippewas, Maynard Kahgegab Jr., wrote of Abramoff’s replacements, “but they are 1/10 the lobbyists.” The Post never printed either letter, or, Abramoff says, anything else ever written on his behalf. (The *Post’*s Susan Schmidt, citing materials released by the Senate committee, maintains that Abramoff’s team wrote the two chiefs’ letters. Both Martin and Kahgegab declined to comment.) But within a week, Greenberg Traurig fired Abramoff. Soon investigators from the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Interior Department, and the F.B.I. were all over the case. So, too, was the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, which began its hearings in September 2004 into allegations of misconduct by Abramoff made by the Indian tribes.

Abramoff believes the hearings were unfair and blames McCain, with whom he says he has long had a contentious relationship: Abramoff raised money for Bush in 2000 and urged tribes not to contribute to McCain. McCain staffers deliberately humiliated him, he says, doling out to the press embarrassing e-mails that the Senate committee had subpoenaed—like the one in which he attempted to fabricate a Talmudic scholarship award from a Jewish organization to fortify his application to Washington’s prestigious Cosmos Club.

“Mr. Abramoff flatters himself,” said Mark Salter, the senator’s administrative assistant. “Senator McCain was unaware of his existence until he read initial press accounts of Abramoff’s abuses, and had never laid eyes on him until he appeared before the committee.”

“As best I can remember, when I met with him he didn’t have his eyes shut,” replies Abramoff. “I’m surprised that Senator McCain has joined the chorus of amnesiacs.”

Even some other Indian lobbyists concede that McCain’s hearings presented a distorted picture of Abramoff and his clients. “The Mississippi Choctaw, the Louisiana Coushatta, the Saginaw Chippewa—they are very wealthy tribes with big casinos,” says one. “They knew they were spending money on him and they had an agenda which was to shut down other, poor tribes. They were getting ripped off, but the idea that they didn’t know they were spending $30 million to kill a rival’s casino … Well, let’s not pretend the Indians are stupid.” McCain’s solicitude toward these tribes and their willingness to play victim for him, this lobbyist says, “makes me want to puke.”

Abramoff was in Los Angeles when he turned himself in to federal authorities in August 2005. He was handcuffed, held overnight, and brought into court in leg irons and chains to face charges of bank fraud in his purchase of SunCruz Casinos. He and Adam Kidan had led a group of investors in buying SunCruz for $147.5 million in 2000, after long and hostile negotiations with Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis, the owner since 1994. Boulis never saw his money, however: Abramoff and Kidan had faked the wire transfer of $23 million which was supposed to be their down payment, and Boulis was shot dead in his car in February 2001. Two of the three men currently on trial for the murder were associates of Kidan, who himself pleaded guilty to the fraud charges in December 2005, tightening the noose around Abramoff. Once Scanlon had pleaded on the Indian-lobbying front, it was only a matter of time before Abramoff did, too.

Abramoff says he’d be saddened by any further indictments. But would he feel responsible for them? “I don’t want to answer that question, if that’s O.K.,” he replies. I asked whether he felt he’d harmed his country. “There were times when I helped the country and the causes that I love and obviously times when I hurt them,” he says. “The exposure of my lobbying practice, the absurd amount of media coverage, and the focus—for the first time—on this sausage-making factory that we call Washington will ultimately help reform the system, or at least so I hope.” The real problem, as he sees it, is big government: “The only thing that a clever lobbyist cannot manipulate is the absence of something to lobby for or fight against.” Thus, to keep future Jack Abramoffs from popping up, government has to slim down. It’s what he’s been saying all along.

After paying or owing a couple million dollars in legal fees, Abramoff says, he’s now living off “the fumes of my savings.” Hiding his assets would be incredibly foolhardy, given the consequences at sentencing were he found out. He’s dabbling in a few projects—energy businesses, property development—and doing some screenplays, written under pseudonyms. A real job is out of the question. “People don’t want to be in pictures with me, let alone business,” he says.

Abramoff has one potential short-term source of funds: the photographs of him with Bush, which became much coveted once Time reported their existence. Publications started sending Abramoff offers, and there was frenzied bidding that quickly rose to the low seven figures. For a time he entertained them; he says he thought he could begin to reimburse the Indians. But he ultimately decided against it, in part because the Democrats had announced—stupidly, to his mind—that they’d exploit them. But to him that’s not the only stupidity in evidence. He blames the Bush administration for the fuss. “My so-called relationship with Bush, Rove, and everyone else at the White House has only become important because, instead of just releasing details about the very few times I was there, they created a feeding frenzy by their deafening silence,” he says. “The Democrats, on the other hand, are going overboard, virtually insisting I was there to plan the invasion of Iraq. This is why this non-story grabbed headlines for weeks.”

Abramoff says he hopes one day to pay back the Indians in full, and to visit them and ask for forgiveness. He also says he’s happy so much of his tainted money is being given by embarrassed politicians to charity. “If it makes one kid’s day better in some tenement somewhere, then that’s good,” he says.

He says he is not really readying himself for prison. “How does one prepare?” he asks. “I don’t have a grand plan for how to survive. I’m putting myself in God’s hands and trusting it will be fine.” In fact, it will be excruciating: One can’t spend more than a few minutes with him before one of his children, ranging in age from 12 to 18, calls or pops in. Apart from the Sabbath and holidays, he has spoken to his parents every day since he left college. “Hey, Dad, everything O.K.? Apart from everything that’s going on?” is how one call began. To his mind, prison for him is pointless. “I can’t perpetrate anything, so what does putting me in a prison do?” he asks. “Put me to work as a teacher in an inner-city school. Let me teach English, history, music. Or let me sweep floors at the reservation. Instead you’ll be paying to feed me to sit in a jail. It’s stupid.” It sounds suspiciously liberal, and tardy too, coming from a law-and-order conservative. But he insists it’s how he’s always felt.

Downstairs from his office, Abramoff handed the parking-lot attendant a $100 bill. It was one of his last, he joked: the rest had gone to all those senators and congressmen. As the men fetched his car, he offered the latest late-night Jack Abramoff jokes. Conan O’Brien had just told a joke about how impressed George Bush was that Abramoff would soon name 20 congressmen; Bush could name only 3. Abramoff laughed heartily at each, though one has to wonder what combination of elements—bitterness, anger, disgust, self-loathing, or maybe even genuine pleasure—made up the mirth. He’s the first to admit how peculiar it has all become. “This whole thing is one bizarre movie about some guy named Jack Abramoff,” he tells me.

We set out into the solemn, dark, quiet streets of the capital, whose epic empty spaces make it a bleak place on a winter night, chillier than meteorologically colder places to the north. He turned right on 17th Street, passing the Old Executive Office Building and the White House beyond, then continued down toward the Washington Monument. By now the unnaturally enormous Capitol, bathed in an eerie lunar light, loomed in front of us, and I almost asked whether, in his newly humbled state, he felt sufficiently tortured by Washington’s enduring landmarks to flee. Then I remembered that he would be leaving soon enough.

We turned down Louisiana Avenue, and he described how, on Christmas Eve, he’d taken in It’s a Wonderful Life with his family, and how, by trying to die, the Jimmy Stewart character, George Bailey, learned just how loved he was. But George Bailey was someone without flaws, he said, something that could certainly not be said for himself.

“I was a killer,” he said as we pulled into Union Station. “I killed for my clients, and it eventually killed me.” He paused, as if he knew that this was no longer enough. That was the old Abramoff, the defiant, zealous, self-righteous Abramoff, and he could not stop there. “Or I eventually killed me,” he continued. “And there were a lot of other hands on the knife.”

David Margolick is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His latest book is Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (Knopf).

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